Before All The World - Softcover

Rothman-Zecher, Moriel

 
9781472157430: Before All The World

Inhaltsangabe

What does it mean to remember the past while still imagining the future? A mesmerizing story of two Jewish refugees and a Black writer - three lost souls who meet in 1930s Philadelphia and together seize new life while haunted by the old.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is a Jerusalem-born novelist and poet. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for a Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a National Jewish Book Award, won an Ohioana Book Award, and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His poetry and essays have been published in The American Poetry Review, Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, and ZYZZYVA, and he is the recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honor, two MacDowell Fellowships, and Yiddishkayt's Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellowship.

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'Before All the World startles and swirls, and makes fresh the experience of language itself. It has it all: a gripping story, an original structure and a tender, ghostly glow' Justin Torres, author of Blackouts

I do not believe that all the world is darkness.


In the swirl of Prohibition-era Philadelphia, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket's, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled to hear his native tongue spoken by this beautiful Black man from the Seventh Ward whose life will soon become entwined with his.

Leyb is haunted by memories from before he came to America, growing up in the shtetl of Zatelsk where one day every last person - except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and he himself - was taken to the forest and killed.

When fate brings Gittl and Leyb back together, they must each grapple with how to face, and sieze, what lies ahead.

Carried along by questions of survival and hope, Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future. It asks, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

'In startling language filled with the flavour of Yiddish's combination words, [Before All the World] moves forward and back and forward again in a dreamlike trance that acknowledges how the worst suffering exists side by side with the tender beauty of memory, friendship, words and the silences of recognition' Ilana Masad, NPR, a Best Book of the Year

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